Calculating a bias in neuroscience: The women asked to speak

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A Princeton neuroscientist and colleagues launched a website to compare the ratio of male and female speakers at neuroscience conferences to the ratio in the conferences' respective neuroscience field over all. (Lilli Carre/The New York Times) â NO SALES; FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY WITH SCI GENDER BIAS BY JAPOORVA MANDAVILLI FOR EPT. 6, 2016. ALL OTHER USE PROHIBITED. --

Photo: LILLI CARRE, STR

One day in August 2015, the Princeton University neuroscientist Yael Niv saw an email notice of a conference on deep brain stimulation, a hot topic in treatment for depression and other mental disorders. Niv noticed that none of the 21 scientists scheduled to speak were women.

This was not the first time that Niv had lamented a skewed lineup.

For years, she had tried to persuade other conference organizers, sometimes successfully, to invite more women to speak. But something about this particular conference, perhaps that the organizers were women, pushed her and about 20 other female scientists over the edge. During a series of furious emails that night, they decided that the best approach they could take was scientific: They would collect data - irrefutable evidence - on the numbers of male and female speakers.

The very next day, they started a website called BiasWatchNeuro, with an inaugural post on the conference. Since then, they have posted gender ratios among speakers at more than 60 conferences in various areas of neuroscience, and compared them to the base rates - the proportion of female scientists in that particular field.

The base rates are estimated from the number of women in grants databases. If anything, Nov said, the site errs on the side of underestimating the base rates.

At about half of the conferences listed on the site so far, the number of female speakers matches or surpasses the base rate in that field in general. But what fuels the project, Niv said, is how many conferences continue to fall not just a little but far short of the proportion of women in that field.

There were a total of just 11 women compared with 213 male speakers at 13 conferences that fell in the egregious offender category - those that were more than two standard deviations below the base rate. Seven conferences had no female speakers at all, and few conferences reached the 50 percent gender mark.

Niv said that she and her colleagues believed that the gap between the ratio of the women in the field and on panels was primarily the result of implicit bias, which some of them have studied.

"Implicit bias is just that - implicit: We are not aware of it," she said. "We are not saying that conference organizers are bigots and purposefully discriminating; they just can't help it."

Some conference organizers have been receptive to the criticism, adding more women to their lineups. But others in the world of neuroscience have taken issue with the mission.

Panels should be organized based strictly on the speakers' merit, they say, and not on any notion of fairness.

Veerle Visser-Vandewalle, one of the organizers of the deep brain stimulation conference, said she was "puzzled by the gender issue" and had never experienced any bias. In selecting speakers for the conference, "it was not our goal to have an equal distribution between, for example, European and American lecturers, or black and white, or male and female," she said. "Their scientific excellence was the criterion."

Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne's List, a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field.

Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science.